Marketing

Our Marketers are classically trained business people who understand your business and have walked in your shoes. That’s why they are a natural extension of your team. Sometimes you’re looking for an extra hand in concept-writing. Or sometimes, you want a talented group of people to identify a white space, ideate a product to fill it, design it, test it, and commercialize it. Either way, our marketers will jump in with both feet!

1. Food New Product Strategy

Opportunity can be fleeting. So The NFL is ready to help you achieve your goals quickly. Our team of classically-trained food marketing veterans, with backgrounds at Fortune 500 food companies and natural food companies, help you to capitalize on unmet consumer needs with our customized processes to develop comprehensive new product strategies for all types of new products – from new brands to line extensions. Taking into account all external and internal factors, we identify the strategic direction that will maximize your revenue and profit. We work in close partnership with you and your team so our solutions really work within your organization.

2. Food Trends Analysis

One of our major areas of expertise is creating a multi-level trend framework, focused on the trends that will have the most impact on the client’s category. The top level of the framework will identify emerging societal trends. The next level of the framework will identify the key consumer wants/needs that arise from each societal trend. The third level of the framework will identify the food and retail trends related to each want/need. The final level of the framework will highlight the implications for the client’s new product development. We will assess the new product implications of all the trends in light of the client’s vision, strategies, brand equities, and key competencies.

3. Ideation

Our creative marketing team can take the innovation process several steps further into the ideation stage. We integrate strategic thinking into the ideation process, leveraging it with creativity and experience to produce results. Our process includes intensive brainstorming with as many new stimuli and engaging exercises as possible, to act as a catalyst for an unparalleled diversity of breakthrough new concepts. The experts from our NFL team – chefs, researchers, product developers, and marketers – enthusiastically participate in ideation sessions in order to take advantage of their experience and knowledge of the category. We can develop individual product ideas or a multi-year new product pipeline. This step will end with a long list of new product ideas, organized in a fashion that makes them easiest to take to the next step of the new products process – filtering.

4. Filtering

We recommend filtering to determine which new product ideas to pursue. Filtering involves four key activities focused around identifying innovation success factors and scoring each idea against those factors. At the end of a filtering exercise, the team consisting of The NFL and the client will have a tighter list of new ideas to develop further.

5. Writing Concepts for Research

We are happy to write concepts for research. We can also have them illustrated for an incremental cost. Our concept writing process incorporates client involvement to review and edit the concepts together before writing a final draft.

Sampling of Services:

New Food & Beverage Product Strategy Our experienced marketing strategy team guides you through the “fuzziness” and identifies a consumer need that only you can fill. Food innovation can be illusive, but we have a track record of creating new products in old categories. Tools include: Discovery tours, trends identification, platform development and many others.
Ideation Sessions Led by professional moderators, sessions are cross-functional, and include domestic and international product stimulus as well as culinary stimulus. We incorporate filtering and preliminary technical feasibility immediately following the session leading to a comprehensive action plan.
Concept Development With almost 20 years of copywriting experience, our team has a knack for conceptualizing an idea and turning it into a written concept. We write a variety of stimulus for research and often re-write “on-the-fly” while participating in research. We also manage creation of visual stimulus, working with our agency partner and our internal packaging team.
Consumer Research Support As strategists, we often support research by being a second set of ears for Clients. We’re great at hearing what consumers mean, not just what they say.
Marketing Consulting Our cross-category experience in Brand Management, Advertising, and Food Marketing Consulting allows us to consult with and advise our clients on a wide variety of marketing issues.